Monday, September 13, 2010

"[W]hen good Homer nods . . ." so can David Mitchell

The Roman lyric poet Horace (65-27 B.C.), famous for his fine poetry, admired the Greek epic poet Homer (8th century BC?), but also expressed his disappointment at that poet's lapses: "and likewise, I am offended when good Homer nods" ("et idem indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus," Ars Poetica, 1.358-9). I have this detail from the edition of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus annotated by Rodger L. Tarr and Mark Engel (page 274, note 35.6).

That Homer sometimes nodded off while composing his epic poems is to be expected. He was merely human, and an occasional poorly wrought line doesn't detract from his greatness.

I say all this as preface.

Preface to what? To my remark upon a moment when David Mitchell nods off while writing number9dream. Here is his slip into momentary oblivion:

Walking back from Kita Senju Station to Shooting Star, a weird cloud slides over half the sky. (page 323)

Kita Senju Station is a subway station in Tokyo, and the Shooting Star is a video shop below protagonist Eiji Miyake's capsule apartment -- in case you're unfamiliar with Tokyo and haven't read number9dream.

Anyway, if David Mitchell were like John Milton -- with his putative reliance upon the model of the Greek nominative participle after "know" to account for the awkward expression, "And knew not eating Death" (PL 9.792) -- then I could argue that Mitchell was following the Greek model of the genitive absolute in constructing that dangling participle that has a truly weird cloud walking from a subway station to a video shop.

I doubt, however, that Mitchell knows Greek (though I could be wrong about that).

But unlike my namesake, the Latin poet Horace, I am not annoyed at Mitchell's lapse, for he did happen to nod off while writing a dream, and his lapse offers evidence that he is, after all, human and can err despite his uncannily impressive literary and linguistic skills.

Not that I intend to let my students slip by with that sort of dangler!

Could it be an artifact of translation from Japanese? Or some sort of language interference? Dropping an implied subject is pretty common in Asian languages -- I was wondering if there is some feature of Japanese grammar that might explain the dangling participle.

Well, Mitchell's native tongue is English, and he's writing in English, so the possibility of Japanese interference is remote, I think, especially since no other dangling modifier occurs in the novel . . . unless I've missed one or two.

About Me

I am a professor at Ewha Womans University, where I teach composition, research writing, and cultural issues, including the occasional graduate seminar on Gnosticism and Johannine theology and the occasional undergraduate course on European history.
My doctorate is in history (U.C. Berkeley), with emphasis on religion and science. My thesis is on John's gospel and Gnosticism.
I also work as one-half of a translating team with my wife, and our most significant translation is Yi Kwang-su's novel The Soil, which was funded by the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.
I'm also an award-winning writer, and I recommend my novella, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer, to anyone interested.
I'm originally from the Arkansas Ozarks, but my academic career -- funded through doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships (e.g., Fulbright, Naumann, Lady Davis) -- has taken me through Texas, California, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, and Israel and has landed me in Seoul, South Korea. I've also traveled to Mexico, visited much of Europe, including Moscow, and touched down briefly in a few East Asian countries.
Hence: "Gypsy Scholar."